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Web Survey Bibliography

Title Online Survey Data Quality and its Implication for Willingness-to-Pay: A Cross-Country Comparison
Author Gao, Z., House, L., Jing, X.
Year 2013
Access date 25.06.2013
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Abstract

The use of online surveys to elicit consumer preference and estimate welfare measures such as willingness-to-pay (WTP) is growing because of the increasing coverage of internet and several advantages of web-based surveys. One potential advantage of online survey is that it is relatively easy to collect data from multiple countries to compare responses to the same questions and therefore contrast consumer attitude, preference, and WTP across countries (Auger, et al., 2010, Okechuku, 1994). However, using online surveys to collect data may result in problems such as lowering the reliability of the data for analysis, or lower data quality. For instance, with an increasing number of survey companies that recruit consumer panels using reward programs (e.g.
www.e-Rewards.com , http://us.toluna.com/ ,  www.panelbase.net ), the chance exists that consumers in the panels are motivated by the monetary reward rather than the motivation to express their true opinions or preferences with regard to an event, policy, program, or product. Additionally, the motivation of taking online surveys may be quite different in different countries, and therefore the data quality may differ significantly across countries. If this is the case, applying the same analysis methods to the data from multiple countries may be inefficient. Previous studies on multi-country comparison using survey data in general assume that respondents answer surveys truthfully, and that respondents in different countries have the same behavior in answering survey questions. However, most recent research indicates that some respondents may not seriously answer online survey questions, and those respondents demonstrate quite different preferences and WTP compared to the respondents who answer the survey questions seriously (Gao, et al., 2012). This implies that developing instruments to control online survey data quality is an important topic for future research. Gao et al.’s research focuses on the US consumer, and it is unknown whether the data quality problem is common across countries and whether the quality of data collected from different countries differs significantly. If respondents in some countries are more likely to give less reliable answers than respondent in other countries, resulting in poor estimates of consumer preferences, we should take additional actions to improve the estimates of consumer preference. Answers to aforementioned questions will provide insightful information to researchers who heavily rely on survey research data and those who consider conducting the cross-country comparison research with online survey data. It may fundamentally change the way of collecting online survey data by including instruments to control data quality. The objective of this article is to 1) determine whether an online data quality problem is common across countries; 2) whether a significant difference exists in data quality across countries; and 3) whether the difference, if one exists, significantly affects welfare measures such as consumer WTP, which have important implications for policy development and welfare analysis.

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Year of publication2013
Bibliographic typeConferences, workshops, tutorials, presentations
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